H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury/January, 1924

THE AIM of THE AMERICAN MERCURY is precisely that of every other monthly review the world has ever seen: to ascertain and tell the truth. So far, nothing new. But the Editors cherish the hope that it may be possible, after all, to introduce some element of novelty into the execution of an enterprise so old, and upon that hope they found the magazine. It comes into being with at least one advantage over all its predecessors in the field of public affairs: it is entirely devoid of messianic passion. The Editors have heard no Voice from the burning bush. They will not cry up and offer for sale any sovereign balm, whether political, economic or aesthetic, for all the sorrows of the world. The fact is, indeed, that they doubt that any such sovereign balm exists, or that it will ever exist hereafter. The world, as they see it, is down with at least a score of painful diseases, all of them chronic and incurable; nevertheless, they cling to the notion that human existence remains predominantly charming. Especially is it charming in this unparalleled Republic of the West, where men are earnest and women are intelligent, and all the historic virtues of Christendom are now concentrated. The Editors propose, before jurisprudence develops to the point of prohibiting skepticism altogether, to give a realistic consideration to certain of these virtues, and to try to save what is exhilarating in them, even when all that is divine must be abandoned. They engage to undertake the business in a polished and aseptic manner, without indignation on the one hand and without too much regard for tender feelings on the other. They have no set program, either destructive or constructive. Sufficient unto each day will be the performance thereof.

As has been hinted, the Editors are not fond enough to believe in their own varieties of truth too violently, or to assume that the truth is ascertainable in all cases, or even in most cases. If they are convinced of anything beyond peradventure, it is, indeed, that many of the great problems of man, and particularly of man as a member of society, are intrinsically insoluble—that insolubility is as much a part of their essence as it is of the essence of squaring the circle. But demonstrating this insolubility thus takes on something of the quality of establishing a truth, and even merely arguing it gathers a sort of austere virtue. For human progress is achieved, it must be manifest, not by wasting effort upon hopeless and exhausting enigmas, but by concentrating effort upon inquiries that are within the poor talents of man. In the field of politics, for example, utopianism is not only useless; it is also dangerous, for it centers attention upon what ought to be at the expense of what might be. Yet in the United States politics remains mainly Utopian—an inheritance, no doubt, from the gabby, gaudy days of the Revolution. The ideal realm imagined by an A. Mitchell Palmer, a King Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan or a Grand Inquisitor of the Anti-Saloon League, with all human curiosity and enterprise brought down to a simple passion for the goose-step, is as idiotically Utopian as the ideal of an Alcott, a Marx or a Bryan. THE AMERICAN MERCURY will devote itself pleasantly to exposing the nonsensicality of all such hallucinations, particularly when they show a certain apparent plausibility. Its own pet hallucination will take the form of an hypothesis that the progress of knowledge is less a matter of accumulating facts than a matter of destroying “facts”. It will assume constantly that the more ignorant a man is the more he knows, positively and indignantly. Among the great leeches and barber-surgeons who profess to medicate the body politic, it will give its suffrage to those who admit frankly that all the basic diseases are beyond cure, and who consecrate themselves to making the patient as comfortable as possible.

In some of the preliminary notices of THE AMERICAN MERCURY, kindly published in the newspapers, apprehension has been expressed that the Editors are what is called Radicals, i.e., that they harbor designs upon the Republic, and are bound by a secret oath to put down 100% Americanism. The notion is herewith denounced. Neither is a Radical, or the son of a Radical, or, indeed, the friend of any known Radical. Both view the capitalistic system, if not exactly amorously, then at all events politely. The Radical proposals to destroy it at one blow seem to them to be as full of folly as the Liberal proposals to denaturize it by arousing its better nature. They believe that it is destined to endure in the United States, perhaps long after it has broken up everywhere else, if only because the illusion that any bright boy can make himself a part of it remains a cardinal article of the American national religion—and no sentient man will ever confess himself doomed to life imprisonment in the proletariat so long as the slightest hope remains, in fact or in fancy, of getting out of it. Thus class consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite—the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich and all the high rectitude of a Pierre Bayard. Another is the doctrine that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron. Another is the doctrine that J. P. Morgan’s press-agents and dish-washers make competent Cabinet Ministers and Ambassadors. Yet another, a step further, is the doctrine that the interests of capital and labor are identical—which is to say, that the interests of landlord and tenant, hangman and condemned, cat and rat are identical. Such notions, alas, seem to permeate all American thinking, the shallowness of which has been frequently remarked by foreign observers, particularly in the Motherland. It will be an agreeable duty to track down some of the worst nonsense prevailing and to do execution upon it—not indignantly, of course, but nevertheless with a sufficient play of malice to give the business a Christian and philanthropic air.

II

That air, of course, will be largely deceptive, as it always is. For the second time the nobility and gentry are cautioned that they are here in the presence of no band of passionate altruists, consecrated to Service as, in the late Mr. Harding’s poignant phrase, “the supreme commitment”. The Editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep to common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give a civilized entertainment. The reader they have in their eye, whose prejudices they share and whose woes they hope to soothe, is what William Graham Sumner called the Forgotten Man—that is, the normal, educated, well-disposed, unfrenzied, enlightened citizen of the middle minority. This man, as everyone knows, is fast losing all the rights that he once had, at least in theory, under American law. On the one hand he is beset by a vast mass of oppressive legislation issuing from the nether rabble of cowherds, lodge-joiners and Methodists, with Prohibition as its typical masterpiece. And on the other hand he is beset by increasing invasions of his freedom of opinion, the product of craven nightmares among the usurers, exploiters and other rogues who own and try to run the Republic. If, desiring to entertain a guest in the manner universal among civilized men, he procures a bottle or two of harmless wine, he runs a risk of being dragged to jail by official blackmailers and fined and lectured by some political hack in the robes of a Federal judge. And if, disgusted by the sordid tyranny and dishonesty of the government he suffers under, he denounces it righteously and demands a return to the Bill of Rights, he runs a grave risk of being posted as a paid agent of the Bolsheviki.

This Forgotten Man, when he is recalled at all, is thus recalled only to be placarded as infamous. The normal agencies for relieving pyschic distress all pass him over. The Liberals have no comfort for him because he refuses to believe in their endless series of infallible elixirs; most of these very elixirs, in fact, only help to multiply his difficulties. And the Tories who perform in the great daily newspapers and in the Rotary Club weeklies and in the reviews of high tone—these prophets of normalcy can see in his discontent nothing save subversion and worse. There is no middle ground of consolation for men who believe neither in the Socialist fol-de-rol nor in the principal enemies of the Socialist fol-de-rol—and yet it must be obvious that such men constitute the most intelligent and valuable body of citizens that the nation can boast. The leading men of science and learning are in it. The best artists, in all the arts, are in it. Such men of business as have got any imagination are in it. It will be the design of THE AMERICAN MERCURY to bring, if not alleviation of their lot, then at least some solace to these outcasts of democracy. That they will ever actually escape from the morass in which they now wander so disconsolately is probably too much to hope. But at all events there is some chance of entertaining them to their taste while they flounder.

III

In the field of the fine arts THE AMERICAN MERCURY will pursue the course that the Editors have followed for fifteen years past in another place. They are asking various other critics to share their work and they will thus be able to cover a wider area than heretofore, but they will not deviate from their old program—to welcome sound and honest work, whatever its form or lack of form, and to carry on steady artillery practice against every variety of artistic pedant and mountebank. They belong to no coterie and have no aesthetic theory to propagate. They do not believe that a work of art has any purpose beyond that of being charming and stimulating, and they do not believe that there is much difficulty, taking one day with another, about distinguishing clearly between the good and the not good. It is only when theories begin to enter into the matter that counsels are corrupted—and between the transcendental, gibberishy theory of a Greenwich Village aesthete and the harsh, moral, patriotic theory of a university pedagogue there is not much to choose. Good work is always done in the middle ground, between the theories. That middle ground now lies wide open: the young American artist is quite as free as he needs to be. The Editors do not believe that he is helped by nursing and coddling him. If the obscure, inner necessity which moves him is not powerful enough to make him function unassisted, then it is not powerful enough to make a genuine artist of him. All he deserves to have is aid against the obscurantists who occasionally beset him—men whose interest in the fine arts, by some occult Freudian means, seems to be grounded upon an implacable hatred of everything that is free, and honest, and beautiful. It will be a pleasure to pursue such obscurantists to their fastnesses, and to work the lex talionis upon them. The business is amusing and now and then it may achieve some by-product of good.

The probable general contents of the magazine are indicated by this first number, but there will be no rigid formula, and a number of changes and improvements, indeed, are already in contemplation. In the department of belles lettres an effort will be made to publish one or two short stories in each issue, such occasional short plays as will merit print, some verse (but not much), and maybe a few other things, lying outside the categories. The essays and articles, it is hoped, will cover a wide range; no subject likely to be of interest to the sort of reader before described will be avoided, nor will there be any limitation upon the free play of opinion, so long as it is neither doctrinaire nor sentimental. To the departments already set up others may be added later on, but this is a matter that will have to determine itself. The Editors will welcome communications from readers, and those that seem to be of general interest will be printed, perhaps with editorial glosses. No effort will be made in the book reviews to cover all the multitude of books that come from the publishers every month. The reviews will deal only with such books as happen to attract the staff of reviewers, either by their virtues or by their defects. The dramatic reviews will, however, cover the entire range of the New York theatre.

In general THE AMERICAN MERCURY will live up to the adjective in its name. It will lay chief stress at all times upon American ideas, American problems and American personalities because it assumes that nine-tenths of its readers will be Americans and that they will be more interested in their own country than in any other. A number of excellent magazines are already devoted to making known the notions of the major and minor seers of Europe; at least half a dozen specialize in the ideas emanating from England alone. This leaves the United States rather neglected. It is, as the judicious have frequently observed, an immense country, and full of people. These people entertain themselves with a vast number of ideas and enterprises, many of them of an unprecedented and astounding nature. There are more political theories on tap in the Republic than anywhere else on earth, and more doctrines in aesthetics, and more religions, and more other schemes for regimenting, harrowing and saving human beings. Our annual production of messiahs is greater than that of all Asia. A single session of Congress produces more Utopian legislation than Europe has seen since the first meeting of the English Witenagemot. To explore this great complex of inspirations, to isolate the individual prophets from the herd and examine their proposals, to follow the ponderous revolutions of the mass mind—in brief, to attempt a realistic presentation of the whole gaudy, gorgeous American scene—this will be the principal enterprise of THE AMERICAN MERCURY.